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Food Glorious Food
After air and water food is the most important element in keeping us alive. Unfortunately it’s beginning to kill us.
You may ask why and how but that is a long and complicated answer but the basics would appear to be this. Long ago when we first came down out of the trees we were gatherers; eating berries, roots, seeds, nuts and fruit and together with a little bit of raw meat and insects. Because we could never guarantee where our next meal was coming from our bodies became programmed to gorge on sugar, fat and salt whenever we could get hold of them. This was fine when we went through periods of famine as we could live off our fat until we had walked to another area where there was food.
It was even OK when we doing hard manual labour on the land, down the mines or even housework because we needed the calories to keep our bodies working but now most of us don’t do hard manual labour, we don’t walk ten or more miles per day but our bodies still crave sugar, fat and salt.
So what happens when we eat all this sugar, fat and salt?
When we were working hard or walking all the time our bodies burnt the sugar etc as fuel to keep us going but now that we don’t do all that exercise it gets stored as fat ready for the next period of famine.
So because we no longer exercise as much as we did but still crave fat etc our bodies store the excess fat and gradually they store more and more fat until we become obese.
So how do we make sure that we don’t become couch potatoes doing nothing but gorge on burgers and sugary drinks?
1) take more exercise nothing strenuous try walking to work or school.
• if it’s too far to walk can you cycle?
• Still too far? Try parking a bit further from work and then walk. Experts are suggesting that we need to walk about ten thousand steps a day to keep us healthy.
• once you’ve started on this regime why not get involved with some sport or exercise class
Apart from the lack of exercise it has also been argued that one of the reasons that we are becoming more obese is that we are eating far more fat through eating more fast food than previously. If you’re interested to look further into this take a look at “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. You may also be interested in the Mclibel case where McDonald’s took two Greenpeace activists to court for libelling the company.
If you can stand watching it there is also the film “Supersize Me” about eating nothing but McDonalds for a month.
Don’t think this is an anti McDonald’s site because it’s not it’s just that they, together with Coke, Nestle and a few others are some of the largest and most well known food brands in the world, and because of their size any action they take can have an impact on our health, farmers, food production companies and their workers.
Because most of us are overweight we often try to get our weight down and to do this we go on to a wide range of diets but do they work? Most experts suggest that the majority of diets will only work in the short term i.e. to get into that wedding dress or that bikini for the holidays.
Too much fat, sugar and salt are not the only issues around food so have a look at our other pages about food and health.
Disclaimer, Target Audience, Jurisdiction Last updated & checked: 22/03/2006